Artificial Intelligence

Google’s AlphaGo

In what was a major accomplishment for DeepMind, Google’s AI research arm, its game-playing AI, AlphaGo, defeated the greatest human Go player in the world. While AI has defeated chess grandmasters in the past, Go is considered a much more complicated game, so the victory was a monumental moment in the AI world. There is a very informative and entertaining Netflix documentary surrounding the match.

Facebook chatbots decided English was inefficient

Facebook built two conversational chatbots and taught them to negotiate, and the results were fascinating. The bots were designed to talk to each other to better learn negotiation strategies, and in the meantime created their own non-human language for negotiation.

Elon Musk vs. Mark Zuckerberg

Back in July, the two technology superstars got in a public dispute over the future of AI. Musk believes that the advancements in intelligence will be the downfall of human society and argues that there is an immediate need for regulations. Zuckerberg, on the other hand, believes this is an irresponsible opinion, and that AI will actually help human society innovate even further. The two went back in forth over social media, trading catty remarks, but both represent the opposite sides of the AI argument: apocalypse vs. utopia.

Autonomous driving car research and development continued to boom

Every major car manufacturer is now heavily investing in driverless car technology, and non-traditional companies are involved in the industry as well. Since August 2014, more than $80 billion has been invested into developing autonomous driving cars.

AI startup funding continues

According to Crunchbase, in 2017 there was over $9 billion in funding rounds to AI companies that work on such technologies as predictive analytics, intelligent systems, speech recognition, natural language processing, computer vision, and general machine and deep learning. In 2016, there was just over $5 billion in funding rounds, showing roughly 80% growth year over year.These themes will continue to make headlines in 2018, but other emerging aspects of AI will make the biggest impact on businesses in the coming year.